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For the CPU bench, it would be nice to see overclocked versions of -K CPUs. Nothing extreme, but even mid-level stable overclocks would give decent reference points. Most people with -K CPUs that visit this site expect to overclock their CPUs at least somewhat. :)

For the Smartphone bench, currently, most smartphones do not show the OS version that was used for the bench. Makes some comparisons pointless.

GPU bench can always benefit from more games.

Anyway, the bench is very good as it is, just throwing out some thoughts. Thank you!Reply

Just to add to gevorg's comments, for most Smartphone benchmarks the charts are sorted so that the best is on top. However, the battery life charts are reverse sorted with best on the bottom.

The GPU 2012 and some of the SSD models are missing the pop-over notes on the test configurations, but I presume those will be added over time. 3DMark Vantage is also filed under DX11 instead of under DX10, although I suppose it might not matter for fill tests.

Given it's popularity, I'd suggest adding Skyrim, especially since the RPG genre doesn't seem to be currently represented in GPU 2012. Seeing it's poor multicore scaling, Skyrim would also make a good CPU benchmark to highlight clock speed and core architecture performance scaling between CPUs. RAGE is obviously the best candidate for the missing OpenGL category in GPU 2012.

WinZip 16.5 is supposed to be OpenCL accelerated when it's released so hopefully you'll be adding that to your CPU and GPU benchmarks. This will probably be the first general purpose GPGPU application that is useful to everyone. It'll be fascinating to see whether closely coupled CPU/IGP like Ivy Bridge and Trinity will be competitive against even high-end discrete GPUs in OpenCL WinZip due to the interconnect bandwidth and latency advantages or whether PCIe 3.0 levels the playing field.Reply

Skyrim and Deus Ex: Human Revolution get tossed into the "not very good games to benchmark" pile as well. They're awesome games (IMO), but relatively poor benchmarks as they mostly bottleneck on the CPU and frankly don't look as good as they should for all the technology they use. (DX11, tessellation, etc. and still mostly CPU bound at 40-50 FPS in areas)Reply

Great write-up on RAGE. I didn't know about all the benchmarking issues. Perhaps Brink would make a better OpenGL benchmark then? It uses a hybrid OpenGL 3.1/2.1 renderer so it's newer than the id Tech 4 moniker would imply. Certainly, the only modern OpenGL 3+ game I can think of other than RAGE. With Prey 2 still coming, an id Tech 4 comparison still has relevance.

Skyrim may still be useful as a CPU benchmark given it's CPU bottleneck. I guess there really aren't many alternatives for a RPG benchmark. Dragon Age II is getting a little old for a 2012 benchmark and Fable III PC didn't seem to be that popular. LA Noire might fit, but I believe it's frame rate capped.

I'm surprised Crysis 2 isn't in GPU 2012. I suppose BF3 has DX11 covered, but Crysis 2 would make a good DX9 stress test. It'd be more graphically intensive than the existing Portal 2 and Starcraft II and allow direct comparison between modern DX11 GPUs and older DX10 GPUs, which is very useful for people trying to decide when too upgrade. Something like BF3, which runs on DX10 GPUs but with effects disabled or with a less accurate substitute wouldn't allow a direct DX11/DX10 raw performance comparison. Might be interesting to throw the ATI X1950XTX, the fastest DX9 GPU I believe, in some of the lowest resolution DX9 benchmarks to illustrate how far we've come in the last 5 years. Portal 2 and Starcraft II supports it and I've heard reports that it works in Crysis 2 even though it's not officially supported.Reply

Please implement the review for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus as soon as you can :)

Brian's thoughts on the LTE debacle was engaging though he didn't cover the CDMA reception which, according to angry birds in the comments section, can get to be pretty terrible in usage in apparent objective disregard for inflated bars.

Mostly waiting for that and the battery life rundown and whether or not the Nexus merits the immediate upgrade for Android 4.0 or if waiting another month for an LTE iPhone/better Android hardware platform will be worth it.

Thanks again for everything! There's a lot to be said about keeping a vigilant watch on testing standards; like they say, polish comes from the cities but wisdom comes from the deserts.Reply

Yeah, the purposes of that initial comparison were limited to just 4G LTE connectivity, I'm currently investigating EVDO. Obviously there are going to be differences between CBP 7.1 (GN/Charge/Stratosphere) and MDM6600 (huge % of phones on VZW), but I'm still gathering data. I don't remember there being this much outcry with those other devices however.

I have been a regular visitor to your site since 1998. In between, you provided a facility to fill the text to support wide screen monitors, by having a A+ icon in the bar. The facility was removed with the improved/new design of website. I want that facility back to reduce amount of downward scrolling. I know your despise for 16:9 format monitor. But, that is what most of the laptops are sold with. To support smart-phones and tablets in portrait mode, you can keep the primary layout same but support for wide screen monitor may also be provided, as it was done previously.I hope you shall be able to control your hatred for wide screen this time and include the facility again for the benefit of your readers like me, who have already committed the sin of purchasing a laptop with 16:9 ratio display.Reply

Would really like to compare my 5970 to cards coming down the pipe. I'm sure others with other cards not on there would like to as well.

Another feature that I would love to see, maybe it's already there but I'm missing it?, is the ability to compare more than 2 products on Bench. Would be great to be able to compare 3 or more graphics cards or CPUs.

Especially some older graphic cards. While you already have 8800GT in the 2012 chart which quite old by now i would like to see some Radeon 68xx and 69xx series in there aswell. I have the HD6850 in my rig right now but im waiting for the 7950 to come by.

One thing i also would love to see is some 2xxxS models of Intel SB in the CPU-chart. For example the 2400S which is quite interesting.

Nice tool. My suggestion would be to add the OS version to the mobile benchmark.

For phones and tablets the performance depends an awful lot on the OS that it is running. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S2 is said to score 58,470 in the Browsermark. While with the current Android 2.3.6 it scores around 90,000. The same goes for apple devices.

And maybe it is a good idea to rerun the most important benchmarks from time to time for popular models, like the S2 and iPhones.Reply

1 - Adding which OS is used to produce results is a top priority. I have that data (and it's been reported in a few reviews), it's just difficult to express right now with some of the presentation fields allowed in the engine (this is something that will be fixed).

2 - I see people saying this a lot, but I have a UK unlocked SGS2 and in the stock browser never see numbers like what I occasionally read in comments. I just re-ran and got close to that number again. This is updated to the latest official ROM using Kies as well.

One thing I want to be absolutely clear on is that we aren't ever going to pick and choose third party browsers to run for smartphone benchmarks. While some combos definitely post better numbers, the purpose is to make relative comparisons (inside the domains of each WebKit + V8 combo for Android, so forth for the other OSes) and also gauge what kind of performance comes stock.

3 - Absolutely agreed, we do re-run things and to the best of my knowledge what's live right now represents the latest data we have. Unfortunately devices do go back after anywhere between 2 weeks (which is 1 week longer than most other reviewers use these phones for smartphone reviews - yes, seriously) or a month. I'll absolutely run things after platform updates though, since bench ultimately has to be helpful to everyone :)

I would appreciate a greater level of consistency regarding what gadgets you choose to include in your test suites.

As an example, the OpenGl ES tests were run across several android phones for easy comparision. However, when the same tests were run on iOS phones, only the 720p offscreen results are reported, not the actual results with built-in phone screen itself. Since the very high resolution of the iPhone4 negatively affects the real graphics perforance, this glaring ommision may give rise to suspicions of giving the Apple platform an undue advantage.

This bench may provide a tool for unbiased comparisions across devices; However such suspicion about biased tests must be countered with a transparent policy on what devices to include in your test suits.

GPU Bench (and the others) are all a great idea, and I'm sure they are a lot of work to be as good as they are. However GPU bench just isn't big enough to really be useful in its current state, and promising to keep the rig for GPU 2012 together for at least 12 months just isn't much of a promise.

I try to use bench when I see deals on video cards to evaluate how they compare to my current card, something I'm sure many do as these are lean years for the world and many of us are on a budget.

Gamer or not upgrades do not necessarily come on a annual basis.The beauty of bench is a common platform to run cards against and compare the benchmarks. If you don't have a common platform that goes back a couple years, then the usefulness of Bench as upgrade tool is limited.

I had thought the original idea of Bench was to take a fast system, benchmark all the cards in it from that point on, and then have common numbers for all the cards you tested from that point forward. Obviously you would probably have to update the test system every few years to keep it getting behind, but doing it every year and not retesting everything on the new system...you are crippling the usefulness of bench and making more work for yourself. Reply

I can understand it being difficult to include older CPUs, and in particular to include mobile variants. But, would it be possible to link un-benched CPUs to the closest benched one with a caveat that the figures are approximations. This would help me to demonstrate how much better a new mobile i3 is over, say, a mobile T8100.

Maybe link unbenched CPUs in the same family/line with average percentage faster/slower than the benched one - e.g. Athlon II X4 6xx

1. Add benchmarks for Folding@home. I bet if you contacted Vijay Pande at Stanford saying you'd like to use one of their "test" work units and clients that you could run on multiple machines (without interacting with their servers) they could work something out. The benefits to them are increased visability for their cause and of course the actual benchmark results, which would help them see how different CPUs perform. The benefits to Anandtech are increased traffic. The FAH crowd is full of enthusiasts who go to sites like these and would read the detailed articles (and those guys really do care about a 5% performance increase). FAH benchmarks would be an advantage over competing tech sites.

2. I love the price / performance scatter plot. What would be really cool (although maybe hard to implement) is where we can choose each axis in the plot. So instead of price / performance we could look at performance / load power, or plot a heavily threaded performance benchmark against a lightly threaded bench to see how they correlate.

3. For the more casual users, you could create some Anandtech benchmark "profiles" so users can compare for their needs. For example a "gamer" profile would be a weighted average of the gamer benches. You could have separate weighted average benches for "HTPC", "productivity", "media encoder", "granny", etc.Reply

I don't like the blog-style front page in the first place, but if it has to stay, fine.

What drives me crazy is trying to find a specific Anandtech review article (as opposed to a news post article.) Even using search I have to sift through too many results, and if I go to the correct website sub-sectoin (CPU, GPU, etc) everything 'tagged' a certain way is all just thrown in together: reviews, previews, news blurbs, and so on. I would like to see a separation of full reviews and all the other junk.Reply

It is kind of silly to list the 8800GT, 285 and 470, but leave out the 9800GTX, 295 and GTX 480. I know you guys are just starting, but I hope to see that list grow quickly and always stick to accurate data over quantity.Reply

1) 2011 and 2012 can't be directly compared, hence the reason for the separate sections. We replaced a 3.3GHz Nehalem with a 4.3GHz SNB-E; it's a huge platform difference. The good news is that we'll be adding a number of video cards (including most of the cards that were in 2011), so you can still see how the cards perform on our current benchmark suite.

2) We'd never put a manually OC'd model in (because that's not representative of a retail product), but a factory overclocked model is an option. The jury is still out on putting in non-reference cards since there are already so many cards in there just from reference.Reply

I've had my Samsung Captivate for a little over a year (...after waiting six months for it to become available in my market). The Fascinate has the same CPU and it's in the Bench database. The Galaxy Nexus is **three to six times faster** than my phone on a CPU basis.

On the other hand, damn, that is some good progress... my next phone should be, uh, slightly faster.Reply

I am not sure how minority the multimonotor testing is, but some bechmarkd would be nice to see allso in multi monitor testing. hose cheaper HD monitors are so cheap that it could be interesting to see allso those multimonitor test. Maybe not with all those games and other test, but some of them would be nice to see. Do I need sli or cf or is single card enough?

Allso any pure DX11 game would be nice, but there seems to be one around at this moment.Reply

It is great you have included some of the older generation devices, such as ATi 3xxx series and nV 2xx series. It makes the database much more useful. However, for the older devices, and their comparison to current products, it would be useful to include comparatives of what are the "most popular" cards, and not just the high end cards. That way the database becomes a useful comparison for real-world upgrades for real-world people and their real-world budgets, e.g. when someone goes from a e.g. 3850 to 6770 or GTX260 to GTX 560 Ti.

I know it takes significant time to build that database... and you can't put every card under the sun there. But add an extra card for each generation reflecting the "popular choice" rather than just the high-end of that generation. Reply

We will be adding more video cards and configurations - including SLI and CF - over the coming weeks. The current cards in Bench are only those we had time to run for our 7970 review, hence the limited selection.Reply

There are still people using them (as evidenced by some of the other comments here) and they provide a good reference point to measuring GPU performance gains over the last few years. Plus they're rather easy to add since only half our suite is DX10, so it doesn't take much time (relative to DX11 cards) to collect the data.Reply

Anand,Thanks for the head start on the 2012 Bench! Even more thanks for including the 8800GT! Yes, I'm still rocking it and it's managing to hold its own on a Starcraft 2 and BF3 (med settings). Good to see that a four year old piece of tech is still working strong.

Any phone, Smartphone or not, is first a communications device - a device for transmitting and receiving information, speech, text, and multimedia messages. The only catagories in your database that remotely address the primary function of the phone are battery life and Wi-Fi speed. All the other catagories seem related to gaming in one form or another.

Much hard work has gone into collecting the data, but it is useless for evaluating a phone.Reply

What I'd like to see is lower end and higher end cards all bunched together... For someone upgrading it's always nice to see such comparisons to gauge if a cheaper newer card is going to be better then what is currently in an older system.

Driver updates and such may be pertinent on competing current hardware but for older stuff.. your just using it as a gauge so it's less relevant overall.Reply

I know some benches are synthetic which is great for everyone and makes it easy to do a comparison however those custom benches you make, it would be great if you explain how excecute them because making direct comparisons to the Anand benches would useless otherwise.

Generally speaking of the CPU-bench that is.

And who uses 3dsmax9 for benchmarking. I don't know if you use samples in it but it's a pain to make a simple comparison nonetheless. The Windows Media Encoder 9 is an another example, how do you benchmark it? Cinebench is a perfect example for a good synthetic benchmark.

/edit And i love to have the classic Anandtech theme from 2000. Yes i used the waybackmachine. Good old memories.Reply

I like to see more selection on GPU's on the bench to make comparisons with. For example, your 7970 review compares it to the 6870 but the 6870 isn't even on the list, while the 5870 is. I also would like to see options like the 4870x2 (SLI, CF) simply because the single 4870 is there. Hopefully this can happen as updates come along and adds to, once again I stress, CONSISTENCY. Thanks.Reply